For those of you who are just coming into, the brotherhood, you still have some exciting college days ahead. You have assumed a responsibility in the life of your chapter not just to perpetuate what you have inherited, but to build upon that foundation a stronger, more vigorous community. You have a right and a responsibility to give guidance to Pi Kappa Phi on your campus in such a way that it is a true reflection of the principles upon which it was founded. The truly good fraternity on any campus is that which reflects the integrity of its charter. The values you learn and teach will be more important than what kind of parties you can “throw.” The service you give to campus and community will count more in the long run than whether you win the homecoming parade contest. You will make the decisions that will determine what your chapter will be like as well as what kind of values you take with you into the larger world.
For those of you just graduating, you will truly feel like a small fish in a very large pond. Where you have some identity within the fraternity and on your campus, you now will feel somewhat robbed of that identity. You begin to build a new identity.
Pi Kappa Phi has played a part in helping you shape your present identity. It will be a part of your future identity. The richness of friendships made will continue throughout your life. Hopefully the respect for others you have learned will continue with you. The religious heritage of your past and present has a place in your future.
But just as you have experienced the seductions of misplaced values in the past, you can experience them in your future. You will feel that you have to carve a place for yourself in a new world and play by new rules.
If the fraternity has had value for you before, it can now. This time perhaps not so directly. You can remember the lessons it has taught. You can serve it as it has served you. You can experience life in the larger world and then help it understand how it can better prepare those who come after you to live responsibly in that world.
If the fraternity is of value in the world today it is because there are people who are willing to remain involved. No institution can survive without that kind of willingness on the part of its members.
We live in a changing world. What becomes of that world is not so dependent on the heritage you have received as it is on what you do with that heritage. I hope we have done our task well. I pray that you will do it much better.